Spring Meta Annotations

Question

Does anyone know that the Spring JAR ( and where to find it! ) Contains functions for Spring so-called "meta annotations". As shown in this article, these cool “new” (well, sorted) constructs allow you to use this code:

 @Service @Scope("request") @Transactional(rollbackFor=Exception.class) @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME) public @interface MyService { } @MyService public class RewardsService { … } 

Basically, I have a Swing app that doesn't use Spring. I have a sudden change in requirements that would be made extremely easy if I could use these annotations.

So, I'm just looking for the smallest, minimally invasive Spring JAR where this functionality can be found. If you need absolute necessity, I can use the entire Spring JAR , but that would be a very difficult decision. It would be nice if Spring released a smaller JAR with less features.

I swing the Maven Repo and see a spring-core that contains a package called:

org.springframework.core.annotation

But when checking API docs, this doesn't seem to be what I need ...

Auxiliary question: can I even use these meta annotations as standalone constructs, or should I use them together with, for example, Spring DI or AOP or other main parts of the Spring frame?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The annotations you want will be associated with the bank with which it is associated. For example, the annotation org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional will be in the spring-transactions artifact.

Meta annotations are actually no different from regular annotations, except that Spring now detects annotations in annotations, whereas this was not the case before. Whether the annotations “work” or not depends on what they are looking for (in this case, something in the context of Spring).

For further reading, see Annotation-Based Configuration Console in the Spring Help.

Answer 2

There is a github project that is trying to provide meta annotation functionality. https://github.com/dblevins/metatypes/